Memory is known to magnify images in memories, especially when they refer to the distant period of childhood or adolescence.
Yet, immersing yourself in them, you experience emotions that are difficult to describe.
Reviewing, even just in pictures, the places where we played as children, where we spent carefree moments, when everything seemed beautiful and friendly, really makes you feel different and the reality that surrounds us is no longer there.
It no longer weighs on our shoulders with its load of life that we have lived. Lived struggling, and always going uphill.
The town where you grew up is always the most beautiful precisely because it is made of the most beautiful memories and even a thousand years later, if it were possible, we would live the moments of childhood as if they happened yesterday.
Last night, in a pizzeria in the centre of town, in the company of friends, certainly younger than me but they are now the ruling class of this beloved community, while listening to their way of seeing Pedara and looking at Pedara, I got to see the details around me.
I started to observe places that in the end have not changed much, at least in their most tangible aspect. Instead, I thought about how the people of Pedara seem to have changed.
Some are gone forever. Almost entirely those generations who taught my generation, with unconditional love for Pedara, are gone. Love for Pedara despite its ancient vices and its ancient, unresolved weaknesses.
Every time I approach my memories of a boy from Pedara, between the 70s and 80s, my heart beats fast.
We were happy and didn't know it.
We went from a dusty game of football to strumming with the rhythm beat of the Salesian oratory.
From a laborious effort in the Marian carts to a house party with accomplices for the first tender kisses.
We were happy in a way that seemed to protect us from infection by a reality that, however, we perceived as distinct from being a peasant, already, a peasant.
How tenderly my girlfriend called my name at the time of my high school.
And I was proud of my way of feeling part of an organism that others could not understand, and of which I spoke proudly.
Yesterday evening my friends were talking, and so much, about a Pedara of tomorrow.
I, to avoid feeling like a foreigner in my own town, went for a ride with my memories, using the bicycle to steady my feelings.
Then, I raised my eyes to the bell tower of the mother church, and found a home for my emotions.
Make this town beautiful, my friends, but remember to listen to its soul.
What made us say, proudly, 'dapidarasugnu' and 'my town is beautiful'!
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